Critical review Anxiety, epistemology, and policy research ‘‘behind enemy lines” Kevin A. Gould Department of Geography, Planning and Environment, 1455 de Maisonneuve W., H 1255-26 (Hall Building), Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 1M8 article info Article history: Received 19 May 2009 Received in revised form 21 October 2009 Keywords: Neoliberal Emotion Fear Epistemology Guatemala abstract Based on my political opposition to neoliberal policies, I elected to conduct dissertation research on a World Bank-funded land policy in Guatemala. This paper explores emotional aspects of this work. Spe- cifically, I describe my fear that research subjects would accuse me of being a spy. I then describe my efforts to cope with these fears and the ways that fear and coping influenced my meaning-making work. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction During my doctoral field work I studied the practices of policy- makers as they implemented a World Bank-funded land policy in Guatemala. As an interested foreign researcher, I was welcomed within the policy-making circles, and I became a quasi-insider in a world of technocrats, economists, planners, and surveyors. How- ever, during the research process I often felt unnerved. As a ‘‘lefty” academic, I was uncomfortable engaging on a daily basis with the authors of this neoliberal policy. This discomfort manifested in the form of anxiety. Specifically, I feared that I would be called out as a spy by the people whose research practices I was studying. To re- duce my anxieties, I engaged a range of coping mechanisms and techniques. This paper describes my fears, the coping mechanisms I used, and how these efforts helped constitute the knowledge I produced through my dissertation. This paper contributes to the growing literature on how researchers’ emotions influence the process of knowledge produc- tion (Jaggar, 1989; Laurier and Parr, 2000; Widdowfield, 2000; Bondi, 2005a; Holland, 2007; Bennett, 2009). This study differs from others that focus on fear and meaning-making in that my emphasis is not on the debilitating, even paralyzing effects of fear with respect to the research process (Widdowfield, 2000; Laurier and Parr, 2000; Wilkins, 1993; England, 1994; Bondi, 2005b). While fear can have this effect, this essay emphasizes how fear— and my efforts to cope—led me in new research directions and to new possibilities. But this paper not only describes my efforts to cope with (manage) emotion (Hochschild, 1998; Hubbard et al., 2001). It also describes how new meaning-making possibilities emerged through unexpected encounters with research subjects with their own emotional lives. Finally, my approach to the study of fear is inspired by recent scholarship that characterizes fear as a multi-layered range of inter-related feelings rather than a narrowly defined emotional response or clinically-determined symptom (Saville, 2008; Pain, 2009). This study also contributes to an interdisciplinary literature fo- cused on the relationship between social science and spying. This literature includes surveys of scholarly participation in the gather- ing of military intelligence (Fluehr-Lobban, 2003; Price, 2004; Barnes and Farish, 2006), as well as studies by researchers who reflect on occasions when they were suspected of being spies (Herbert, 2001; Owens, 2003; Simmons, 2007; Sallaz, 2008). My investigation represents a modest new direction: I seek to address the meaning-making work set in motion when researchers fear they will be accused of spying by their research subjects. This is, I contend, a relevant issue given that many scholars express concerns about it. 1 2. Situating fear As Tolia-Kelly points out, the possibility of experiencing a par- ticular emotion is contingent upon specific and uneven geometries of power (2006). What were the conditions for the anxiety that I felt while conducting research with policy-makers? My first task was to make my way into the Guatemalan agrarian bureaucracy; I was welcomed in part because of my status as a white-skinned, 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.10.014 E-mail address: kgould@alcor.concordia.ca 1 Searching Google Scholar with the terms ‘‘ethnography” and ‘‘spy” yields a long list of papers in which authors briefly describe their concerns that they are viewed as spies by research subjects (search October 11, 2009). Geoforum 41 (2010) 15–18 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum